Moderating The Moderators
Moderating The Moderators
And watching the detectives.
A week ago, my 30-year-old son started college. Oh I am so proud. Oh he is so proud. Oh he is having such a good time!
Yesterday he came home from school with some disturbing news: His professor is a Trumper, and this is how he knew. “I told her I’d watched the debate with Grandma,” he told me. “And she [the professor, not Grandma] said wasn’t it a shame that it was ‘three on one’ against Trump.”
Ah. The old “the moderators ganged up on Trump.” We sure heard a lot about that Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Evan wrote a whole masterpiece about it!
IT WAS THIS MASTERPIECE!
But … here’s the thing. The moderators didn’t fact-check Donald Trump on his 33 (plus) lies. They didn’t say, “Mr. Trump, inflation under Joe Biden is not the highest it’s ever been, you were alive in the ‘70s. Remember? The cocaine?” They didn’t nitpick him here there and everywhere on things that could conceivably be a matter of opinion or hyperbole. The only time the moderators came even close to picking a nit was when Trump claimed that crime was growing, and David Muir of ABC News pointed out that the FBI says violent crime is falling.
The (few, but they made an impact) times moderators Muir and Linsey Davis calmly and firmly checked Donald Trump was when he spewed absolutely made-up fictional shit.
LINSEY DAVIS: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born.
And why did Linsey Davis say that? Because Trump said Democrats made it legal to execute babies after they’re born, and there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.
NOPE!
And some more.
DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —
And why did David Muir say that? Because immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating dogs, they’re not eating cats, they’re not eating the pets. And that very day, JD Vance had said it doesn’t matter if the rumor that they are is false, people should keep spreading it.
YIKES!
Sheeit, even the (on politics) ghastly New York Times commended the anchors for their firm and fair moderating — i.e., not letting candidates say fictional shit.
Which — and I like Jake Tapper, I know all y’all don’t — was very different from the way things had gone in the Trump-Biden debate, when CNN’s anchors sat there like statues while Trump told one Weekly World News fable after another. Muir and Davis insisting on a minimum of “not telling shocking fucking whoppers with no pushback” was heartening, and it was right.
I had my own nits to pick with their moderating! Muir needs to stop calling Trump “Mr. President”; there is one president at a time, and right now that’s Old Handsome Joe. And they let Trump have his way with his precious last word on literally every single exchange. So I’ll give them an A- instead of an A. But that A- is magnitudes better than any moderating we’ve seen in ages.
I would happily have accepted a moderating job like cartoonist Ben Garrison depicts above, where the moderators actually screamed at Trump and pelted him with fruits. “Do you regret being horrible” would have been an excellent question.
Sadly, they did not.
But here’s the kicker to our terrible tale. That professor, who thought the moderators were “three against one” in not allowing Trump to say things unanswered that were literally fictional — that professor is his instructor in “critical thinking.”
So does she believe Democrats have made it legal to execute babies? Does she believe the Haitians are eating the pets? Did she use her critical thinking skills to read the claims, look at the sources, and evaluate them for credibility? Or did she outsource her brain to “whatever Donald Trump says it is”?
I told my son he should write a paper on using critical thinking skills to evaluate Donald Trump’s fake shit during the debate. He is not confrontational, and he declined. (But he should.) But here’s what he did say, and I took comfort. He’s a young white man; he’s blue collar; he’s uncomfortable with abortion (sigh); he’s a little more authoritarian than I understand.
“Mom, after that debate? I’m all fucking in on voting for Kamala after that.”
Some professors think academic freedom means they can say whatever but the truth, in a real and legal sense, is that they're responsible for an environment where the students feel free to express themselves. We were given clear guidance about not doing this kind of shit.
Is it possible that all this talk of eating dogs and cats is a simple misunderstanding? Maybe they are eating hot dogs with catsup?